One shouldn’t be fooled by all the PR and rhetoric (let alone the ads) coming from both Bells and cable about what is supposed to be our innovative and creative media future. What Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and others want to give us is a souped-up interactive digital system delivering lots of TV-like entertainment—accompanied by a torrent of personalized advertising. That’s why the cable and phone monopoly are opposed to network neutrality. A truly open system would permit our eyeballs and clicks to really roam free. That’s something that terrifies them, since we would likely be engaged with content they either don’t own or are able to impose a mafia-esque system of payments on (Telco/cable bosses to Gates, Page, Brin, Diller [fill in your name here or favorite site]. If you don’t pay us our digital “vig,†your content is going to end up buried in silicon floating in the East River).
So we think it’s instructive, as part of this blog’s early digital warning function, to give folks a preview of the content soon coming to our broadband screens. What does Verizon plan to offer us, in exchange for killing off community oversight of cable and the scuttling of network neutrality? “Widgets.†Yes, Verizon is running fiber to the home so, according to The Deal, it can offer a “widget†service that “will display local weather and traffic info on TV screens without interrupting a program†[“The Phone Man: Verizon’s CTO, Mark Wegleitner, on how the Bells plan to compete with the cables.†Chris Nolter. June 19-25. 2006]. Wegleitner told The Deal that Verizon is also planning products for “heavy-duty gamers. Maybe they are watching the equivalent of QVC for gamers and say, Boy, I’d like to get more information on that. So they click a button and zip to an infomercial on that game.â€
That’s not all. Verizon wants to sync up its mobile video service with what we view over broadband. Verizon SVP, video solutions, Marilyn O’Connell told Screenplays magazine (which covers the broadband market) that the company is thinking about all the triple play revenues it can make from selling music, gaming and information across all platforms. So we are going to see what she calls “threads between what VCAST [Verizon’s mobile content service] is developing in portable snacking on entertainment, and what we’re creating over on the TV side, as well as on the broadband side†[“A View of Things to Come on Verizon’s Roadmap,†June 2006].
This is what we’re going to get if we allow Sen. Ted (“Internetsâ€) Stevens and the bunch of “under the Bell $ influence” R’s and D’s in the House (led by Joe Barton) to get their way with the Telecom bill.
